making apps, making webs.

A new language learning website has come out, called Ba Ba Dum (build 128, version 1.1.1).  This is my review. tl dr; don't use it for learning languages where the gender of the words matter - like in German. I first heard about the website through some UI/UX/js/css/web people (thanks Leigh and Paul !).  Not only is this interesting to me from a web app perspective (that's what I do for my day job), but I'm also very interested in making games, as well as learning languages.  So, naturally I checked it out. It's a great start, and very well made!  Not only did they draw all the illustrations, but made the fonts!  It's also, I think, a great example of content marketing, ie making something useful for people showing off your skills.  This project shows that these people can produce a quality product (see making of , and the credits ).  Reviewing a project fairly without knowing the brief is always impossible.  So I'm reviewing i...

Podcast - "A multimedia digital file made available on the Internet for downloading to a portable media player, computer, etc." If you have a modern phone, ipod, or mp3 player you can play podcasts on the move.  Or you can listen to them on your computer when you're not mobile.  It may seem a bit weird explaining what a podcast is... but there are many people who do not know what they are, or haven't tried them.  Skip to the bottom for lists of German podcasts . Situations where you may be able to learn with a podcast: sitting at the computer doing an office job (if you don't need to talk lots!) on a bus/train, or walking/running (be careful!) Other methods of learning may not be possible in these situations.  For example, you probably can't have a teacher follow you around the park as you go jogging.  Also, they probably can't sit next to you at your office whilst you work. It's always better if you can talk out loud along with the podcas...

Touchless UI?  This is the next step in my little adventure into the world of Arduino... It can sense light, from which the Ardunio reads an analog signal and then drives a Servo Mototor.

With the new firefox 13, on start-up it does not reload all of the tabs at once. Theoretically this means firefox loads faster.  Since it only needs to load one website when you restore, not all of them. This is a great example of a UX/UI app experience that seems good for users, but is in fact bad.  This comes up quite often when optimizing applications, and I have even done this style of optimization in the past.  So I'm using this as a case study in why doing this is not good from a UX perspective. The Scenario. I have 8 tabs, and I'm using most of them. Old firefox behaviour. Firefox loads, I go away whilst it loads itself, then loads all 8 tabs. I wait .  It takes a while to load - but some stuff can be loaded at the same time, in parallel.  If they are fast pages it is pretty much instant, and I can get to work. If they are slow pages, then I have to wait once until they are all loaded.  I can go off and do something el...